Teaching, rebuking, correcting & training in righteous web design.

Act Your Age, or Marketing for Geeks

Marketing? What has that got to do with my church web site? Well, everything. Consider the following excerpt from the 10th chapter of Romans:

For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

But how are they to call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?”

And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”

In other words, it’s not just enough to have a good message, you need to take steps to get that message out! And if you’re using your website as part of that effort, then you need to take steps to make sure you market your church web site. The problem is, some of us are pure geek, so we don’t necessarily see the world through the eyes of a marketeer, or even our users. A point well made by Eric W. Sink in his post Act Your Age where he writes:

Several of my recent articles could be considered a series which I would entitle “Marketing for Geeks”. The central theme is that if we demystify marketing, it can be competently done by technical people.

… However, most geeks tend to shy away from marketing, citing their lack of creativity and graphic design skills. But these are typically not the differentiators which determine whether marketing is competent or not. Marketing efforts tend to succeed or fail on their strategy and tactics, not on their artwork. Before you start designing logos or wordsmithing your ad copy, you need to do three things …

If this sounds familiar, it is because I’m always talking about making sure your web site projects the personality and purpose of your church. And if that’s not enough to get you to read the above article, and the articles contained in the above article, then perhaps this quote from Simon Willison’s Weblog will inspire you to read the article(s):

… Marketing for Geeks, a series of articles (three at the moment) by Eric Sink. I’ve never really been interested in marketing but Eric got me hooked with geek friendly examples such as Paint Shop Pro and CityDesk and I ended up learning a great deal. The writing style is similar to that of Joel Spolsky, …

2 Comments

In the shameless plug division, I am going to point your readers to my entry where I unpack a logo I just designed for my new church. I explain the process I used to design our identity so it fits with our ‘marketing’ plan for the church.

Right on! This is the stuff of interest to me – the technology we can figure out, and plenty of folks who put food on the table by working in Marketing, but try to combine the two with the goal of building a great church site and you’ll quickly find a huge void. I sorta forced our Board of Directors to talk about what “brand attributes” they wanted to communicate for our church, but man – it’s like pulling teeth! I’d love to see more people talk about church branding, but when I bring it up in places like church-site chat, it’s like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons where all he hears is the cricket chirping…;) But ask a javascript question and be prepared for the onslaught…